Where To Get Story Ideas (Article)…

I drink a lot of beer. I like classic rock and roll. As a nineteen-year-old I fought in Vietnam. My father was a wife beater. That’s why I joined the army at the age of eighteen. I grew up in a steel town. I grew up in the ghetto. I spent most of my life around college students or being a college student myself. I was the front man for several years in different basement rock bands. After Vietnam I hung out at a local college that had a first class ballet department. I have known women. And so on and so forth.

What does any of this have to do with anything? It’s what I write about. And I don’t think any of these experiences are unique. It’s simply my life.

In other words, whatever your life is it’s a gold mine of material for your fiction.

2 Responses

Hmmm, you really do have that beer drinking thing going on and it seems to work for you. I’m reading through your articles and fiction…we have a lot in common. Military, band, father was a wife beater, long time college student, if you tell me you’re a jack Mormon, lived on an Indian reservation and have
Appalachian ancestry I just might decide we’re kin folk.

Betty, I would love it if we were kin folk. Since I really do drink a lot of beer in real life, I decided to make it a device in my fiction. My characters drink to remember, to forget and to help kill the pain of life. Just like real people in real life. A writer must write about what he or she knows.